Pesquisa e inovação biomédica avançada

Effectiveness of traditional medicine and acupuncture on diseases does not have a cure

Sreelakshmi Asokan

Introduction: Diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis all come under the umbrella of neurodegenerative disease. There is a sudden steep increase of 0.5% in incidence of people suffering from these diseases under the age of 65 to 75 years. The ratio increases in age groups above 85. So, it is the need of the hour to tackle thin scenario and provide a better healthcare to increase the quality of life.

Background: Prevention is better than cure. It's rather easy to prevent a disease than to cure it. This is where P4 medicine (predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory) provides an ability to identify individuals who are at a high risk of certain diseases like Alzheimer’s. So identifying and providing prophylactic treatment to high risk populations helps to increase the quality of life and reduce the vulnerability of contracting with the progression of the disease. Often the primary stages of these neurotic diseases go unnoticed due to their asymptomatic behaviour. These conditions are often diagnosed after the loss of brain volume due to neuronal death, thereby leading to an inflammation by the time the disease manifests. Gut microbiota has a huge influence various neurological outcomes like learning, cognition and memory. It modulates brain development; behaviour has been implicated in several neurological disorders like Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, stress and much more. It is often found that individuals with neurodegenerative disease have a lesser number of gut flora than compared to the rest of the population. Gut microbiota is essential to produce a compound called butyrate which is highly necessary for communication between gut and nervous system. According to Ayurveda, vata is catabolic in nature and it is the vitiation of vata that leads to development of neurologic disease in that way, vata prakriti are at high risks. Vata in the body has a catabolic nature. As the body starts ageing catabolic activity in the body increases, and being the same prakriti increases this activity and speeds up the process of catabolism in the body. It is also noticed that vata prakriti people has a kroora koshta which refers to mainly erratic bowels habits and constipation. So, taking all these points to consideration we can try identifying these individuals and provide them with prophylactics at the earlier stage to prevent further progression of the disease.